Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I don’t want to review this, f*** you.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 2 Book 28/30 It’s too good! I loved it too much! This is like how I put off watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier because I love Bucky too much. My feelings, THEY CANNOT BE CONTAINED WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO MAKE ME CONTAIN THEM. I was going to try and re-read this before I reviewed it to try and make some thoughts more thoughtful and coherent, but I just don’t have the time right now, even though […]

“It was the worst fact of parenthood, that what you did mattered so much more than anything you said”

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

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I love time travel. To me, nothing is better than a good time travel book. (I know I say this every time I review a book with time travel.) I have read and enjoyed Emma Straub’s other books, so I was eagerly looking forward to this one. I was thrilled when I learned it would have time travel in it. (Also, you have to love Straub, as she owns an independence book store in Brooklyn.) In This Time Tomorrow, Alice’s life at 40 is not […]

Penpals Across the Timestream

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

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This is an interesting book told in epistolary (letter) form. It won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novella (!). Two agents, Red and Blue, working for different time-traveling agencies, start off as adversaries as they travel up and down multiple timelines to defeat each other’s organizations to prevent them from coming into existence. They are immortal and capable of being any creature they wish to be, mostly killers. Sparring with one another across strands of time, they develop a respect and familiarity with […]

“We knew it was coming, but we behaved inconsistently.”

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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Reading Emily St. John Mandel is like falling asleep to the sound of rain: The words wash over you and a steady drumbeat of beauty lulls you into something like perfect contentment. Just reading the loveliness of her sentences would be enough, but then she continues to dazzle by leading your thoughts into new possibilities about the universe, as your mind is apt to drift to questions of cosmic import in the moments before sleep, while those steady drops beat against your windowpane. It’s hard […]

When reality plays whack-a-mole

At the End of Your Tether by Adam Smith

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All I want to say about At the End of Your Tether is that it is the result when what seems like reality takes a walk in the other side. I mean, there is no logic to this illogical ride of madness, time travel, alternative realities overlapping and coming of age. Adam Smith, you might be a nice person, but you have one heck of a warped mind. What starts out as a graphic novel of a teen name Ludo moving to the Air Force […]

A quietly thrilling side-quel to The Glass Hotel in the key of Cloud Atlas

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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I would list the HBO Max adaptation of Station Eleven as one of the few adaptations better than the book it came from. I loved that mini-series and thought it both illuminated and improved the source material. I do not feel it is a slight to Emily St. John Mandel to say that, as she was heavily involved in the adaptation. Mandel is one of the most interesting authors working right now. She is enormously talented at world-building and tight, beautiful prose. However, her characters […]



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